Also possible causes were changing load order and removing two mods that claimed to not change the checksum (ck2-style icons ones). I know that the checksum changed mid-run as a result of the combination of those alterations, but I'm not sure what exactly caused it.
A mod that changes traits *COULD* change something about /common/traits.txt which can be a factor in any mod that adds traits because of trait indexing. Load order could also be a factor. Not saying that is what going on, but since the bug is gone and I can not replicate it, its not something I can troubleshoot now.
Also, in my second run Camilla got "stuck in limbo". He ended up being a lord of nothing (some title with zero dejure lands) with 8 knights and zero levies in his army. Not sure how exactly he ended up this way, as I wasn't the one who took his last real lands.
Camilla has a landless Duchy title of Via Peccati. About a dozen canon characters have duchy or kingdom level landless religious titles.
If the mod in its current state is not enjoyable to you, then perhaps play something else for awhile. There is a great new DLC from Paradox which has a lot more resources for us for care, polish and quick production schedules. There are also hundreds of other mods you might like. Try us again when the mod and CK3 have had more time to mature.
You might to approach POD right now as less as a brilliant balanced Grand Strategy Game and battle simulator, and more as an RPG you play on the map. If that isn't something you would enjoy, perhaps this is not the mod for you. We do not want to ignore the war aspects of the game, and we are definitely pushed the AI calculations for when to have wars and when to engage in wars to the breaking point by bringing levies back with the hunters. The core issue is that how the AI chooses to battle is based on hard code calculation based exclusively on the number of troops, and no other factors: not the the prowess of champions, not quality of MAA, not any lifestyle, legacy or leadership perks that modify any combat or war related function. We've requested this change, but so far it has not. Our player survey has a question about whether vampire lieges should receive levies. The opinions coming in favor increasing the levies available to vampire lieges. So we will have to surrender to the engine on this one, and will likely increase levies for vampire lieges, allow lieges to get levies from their vassals. It will also mean probably reducing the damage impact of champions. We may be able to make them endure more damage, and we hope to make great use of the new duel system to represent their supernatural fighting prowess through duel events. We also are reworking our MAA, which have been essentially untouched since September 1st.
So far the survey responses are favoring us working on mod better integrating with some mechanics of CK3 and content for vampires, rather than expanding to another splat. There are also some quality of life improvements we are looking at (and the changes to allow automating feeding from herd is part of that, but we also want a character record tab for minions, etc..). This was our inclination after the Inquisition update and before the survey was released. The release date of the 1.3 update and Northern Lords Flavor pack caught us a bit by surprise, so we had to rush an update for that faster than we would have liked.
We are still feeling out the impacts of the new duels on our mod and have big plans to add to them. The long term consequences of the updates PDS made to legacies are still to be experimented with in regards to the mod.
Fortunately you can replace them. But I still think that just shutting them down without immediately putting a different building in place should be an option. Maybe create a dummy building with zero cost and zero effect just for that purpose?
Buildings, as you have observed, are difficult to work with. We are trying lots of different things to have them work in an adequate way: that NPCs build appropriate buildings, that the buildings scale well relative to each other, and that when a holder of a different faith or of a different type (like a hunter taking over a vampire's territory or vice versa), that an appropriate change in buildings happened. Fortunately, you can replace them. On thing I noticed that replacing some buildings requires creating new buildings that might have a minimum amount of needed control, this can confuse players who recently conquered territory not being able to immediately replace a building that is disabled. Once they raise control of the province though, they can replace it.
The game essentially devolves into "own duchy capitals and win" right now. And that's kinda boring.
Counties without "prince of" building chain aren't worth their weight in demesne size.
It also feels wrong without the vanilla CK's "own and controll duchy" requirement. You can give away 5/6 counties of a duchy to either your vassal or to your enemy, but you're still somehow a prince of a local metropolis? Really? Doesn't having more influence over literally every surrounding city count for something? Isn't vampire culture supposed to be fiercely competitive (dog... erm... bat eats bat world) ? I can't imagine them owning all the surrounding area but still tolerating me sitting on the best spot without contesting my rule over it.
This is a design decision based on lore where we differ a little from base CK3. Duchy capitols as also very important in CK3. For lore reasons, princes of cities are powerful but they usually have to tolerate and share the greater metropolitan area with a number of squabbling vampire vassals. Further the prince often has to tolerate a number of individual vampires or even whole coteries that do the bare minimum of obeying the laws of the Prince (or Sabbat Archbishop) without significantly contributing to the Prince's power in anyway.
Of course, if player decision or events conspire so that a Prince only has the capitol duchy and ALL of the other 3 to 5 county holdings are held by a another vampire, they wil likely try to usurp the duchy title; unless there are complicating factors like high opinion, high dread, high troop numbers of the ruling Duke. Best approach is probably to avoid allowing a "mega-count" to become more powerful in terms of troops/gold/etc... than a Duke. Our start in 1230 has a lot of weak princes who need to increase their domain if they want to survive usurpation or revolts by their vassals. The Council of Ashes almost always falls apart due to such an issue usually led by Radu of Bistri. This actually works really well with the lore considering the weak position of
Nova Aprad. Still, even if she is dislodged, if she survives she has claims that her family in the Eastern Lords might help her press so that she can return to Transylvania.
This map from Vampire: the Requeim's "Damnation City" provides a good example. The "Primogen" are usually elders who are the frenemies and potential rivals of the prince. A Regent holds a considerable piece of territory in the city, and then they have vassals under them. We think that a "Prince" in terms of CK3 mechanics corresponds well to the "Duke" rank as most Duchies correspond to modern greater metropolitan areas. "Counts" correspond to the VTM rank of "Baron", though the titles that vampires use are not consistent with in a sect. Regardless, we think a Prince not having control of all the counties in a duchy is fine. Definitely, holding the capitol duchy (the core of the city) is more important than any of the other counties in the duchy. And we go even further with this in having some historically largely population cities being extremely useful to a vampire prince (the Inquisition is indifferent to the population size of a duchy capitol). This is not something we are likely to change. It a design decision and you don't like it, and thats fine. You have correctly figured out that duchy capitols in POD are fare more important than in base CK3(though they are still important in CK3!) and that champions are more important than in base CK3 (though they are still important in CK3!) While we make tweak some of these things and mildly nerf or buff aspects of the relationship, the general ideas that duchy capitols, large population historical cities, and champions are very important for the game strategy aspect of POD is unlikely to change. Also unlikely to change is our smaller personal domain limits.
While Dark Ages Vampire arguably has territorially large domains than the final nights of Vampire: the Masquerade, the Princes of London, Paris, Cairo, Baghdad, etc... did not have homogenous, monolithic domains in which the Prince alone had territorial claim.
Many innovations don't do anything at all, or do something that's barely significant.
We have added no innovations to the game. All we added was some empty future eras. We would like to do something with innovations in the future. However, your complaint about innovations not having significance are an issue you should bring up with the developers of CK3, not a small modding team.
In both of my runs I've tried changing vassal contracts.
Vassal contracts need work, including having the vampire specific contracts "do something". We are aware our characters are immortal, and that certain decisions like waging a kingdom level holy war, or doing a warmonger kingdom conquest, moving a realm capital and modifying vassal contracts should happen more than once a lifetime. We have extended many of these to a cool down for 50 years. In POD, vassal contracts are supposed to be at the moment alterable at any time if you have the hooks or are willing to take the tyranny. Localization may be lagging behind the functionality. Or that change might be bugged. But we did make an effort so far to address. We are aware of "lifetime" limit issues for immortals and are working to solve them. I believe we've addressed most of them. We will probably leave "creating a new faith" to once a lifetime.
I just tested it, and I could change my vassal contracts easily many times in 1230 to 1231 as long as I had a hook if I wanted to avoid tyranny.
You also said the faith plays a bigger part in PoD than in CK3, but I haven't seen any examples of this thus far.
In fact seems to be the other way around. In vanilla CK3 there's very little faith tolerance, so changing faith comes with tangible issues.
Thus you either adhere to the "rules of faith" set for you by the games, or you pay dearly for changing them.
In PoD there's a ton of mutually tolerant faiths that come with all kinds of rule sets. (I think I even saw a sabbath sub-faith that can live alongside the rest of vampiric word without batting an eye, though that one lacked description, so maybe that's an oversight and not a feature?).
So you just pick whatever fits your preferences and roll with it.
If you actually add some faith-specific events with heavy influence on gameplay (forcing you to adhere to it's methods to control the beast or some such) things might change, but as it stands faith in PoD is a joke.
Faiths currently add flavor, create a lot of hostility between different characters and realms, have different crimes. We also use tenets like conscience vs. conviction or self-control vs. instinct to influence outcomes of for some actions for specific vampire events, decisions and interactions like diablerie, hunting, executions and frenzy. We plan to do more with them in the future. They are varied by their doctrines and tenets now. We do have some rather large faiths like Via Regalis that are plurarlist and tolerant; and we have a special toleration doctrine between Road of Humanity, Road of Heaven and Road of Kings called three pillars that has those high clan vampires to play more nicely with each other despite some differences of opinion on the path to enlightenment and how to manage their beast. Others are not so tolerant. With our recent updates for Shadow Inquisition, we altered a lot of the costs for using our new vampire and hunter related doctrines to make it more possible for a player character to create a new faith using them. We also diversified the holy site locations (and we plan to further diversify the bonuses that come from holding them). I am glad we have put as much work into religions and faiths in the mod that we have so far. It would be a much poor experience if all the characters had vanilla CK3 faiths, or all were just a singular Road like "Humanity" (as is the current V:TM V5 setting).
We are planning more faith-specific events, but that also fall under the category of "adding more content" since those are more likely to be narrative related. A late addition to the Inquisition update was re-enabling Crusades/Great Holy Wars and religious heads.
Another late addition to the Inquisition was adding the various Sabbat Paths of Enlightenment as faiths under the Sabbat religion, and ensuring that the player character who goes Sabbat may chose one, that Sabbat NPCs choose a variety, and that what faith the Sabbat Regent has chosen influences that decision (and the possibility of the player character being Sabbat Regent was already in the mod. Since these events don't happen until 1493, its currently late game content. We want to expand more into the Camarilla and Sabbat in the future, and are still feeling out what will mechanically be different about them compared to the 1230 start.
I think some core parts of the mod still need (as in really need, not just "could use") more work, so adding more content now seems... I dunno... premature? rushed? careless?
And it's dangerous to leave such a (supposedly) core feature in such and unfinished state while pushing for more content.
Your bug reports and suggestions are appreciated. We know many things in the mod need doing, thus we released survey to help define the priorities for our small team. We would appreciate if you would not speculate our motivations for when we have chosen to make an update for a mod and why we have addressed this or that bug, added this or that feature, or added this or that piece of content.
You may want to temper your expectations for polish for a free mod working on a recently released game that is still having dynamic changes to base functions. I, personally, would appreciate a less... I dunno... condescending tone. Maybe a little less hyperbole about our efforts being "a joke" and having not addressed issues you bringing up being "death-traps" or "dangerous". Come on, its mod of a game. No lives are lost in the process. If you don't like what we are doing, thats cool. Play games you like. I personally even grow bored with games I like.
Getting game play right between buildings, armies, battles, characters, modifiers and "balance" can be very tough and is also almost always a work in progress. Stellaris isn't the same game it was at release. Imperator has gotten a major overhaul and I hear it is even good now! We definitely tested the envelop on a lot of what is possible in CK3. Some of those things worked, some of those things worked too well, and some of them didn't work well, and some of them didn't work at all. Adding some new things like cosmetics, graphics, events (big and small), characters, etc... can be done without having a major impact on game play but still add a lot of flavor and immersion to the mod. Other things like altering the rate gold, levies, MAA are gained, lifestyle XP gain, or how powerful champions are can be easy to alter but very hard to get the balance and feel right, and some of those feelings are going to be subjective.
We had an awful time trying to balance vampires vs. hunters in terms of wars and battle, and having 1230 stat be hard for hunters and easier for established vampire empires, but to have hunters grow into some kind of significant threat in the 1400s WITHOUT having them always take over the entire map. We eventually addressed this by a lot of rather not obvious work in terms of making Vampire NPCs smarter about what they build. We also put a good deal of work into random character templates and making it a bit of a challenge to build a good council, but having to do it also influences the prospects of NPC councils.
Someone who is great at making characters may not be great at modifying vassal contracts, but then again maybe they are! Someone who does 3D models, or 2D coat of arm charges. Generally, we are glad we did a day one release for the mod, even if there is still a lot more we would like to do with it. We are also glad that we did a big content update by adding hunters. We are glad we did an update for 1.3 so that the mod could still be played, that all the characters would not be bald, etc... We are glad that we added vicissitude transmogrification interactions in the Transmogrification update. We are glad that we added Blood Sorcery interactions with a new GUI in the Inquisition update. Not releasing them would not have been a good approach in my opinion. We do not think having not done these updates would have been good. We have been putting a lot of time into the mod, so it is not a lack of effort. We also query our patrons, who double as our player testers as they have access to the development build of the mod, of whether an update has had significant enough additions and testing that it warrants releasing to the public.
Our update deployment schedule right now will most likely be quarterly, unless there is a base CK3 update, new flavor pack or new expansion. We can't commit to such a schedule given that our team is volunteers, but quarterly is our aspiration and what we plan our work schedule around. Not everything on the schedule gets done according to the schedule and people work on parts of the mod where they have the most ability and inclination. If our updates do not come as quickly as you might like, then I suggest downloading notepad++ (or a text editor of your choice) and lending a hand. Some of our best team developers got involved because there was some change with the mod they wanted done faster than the existing team could accomplish. Our discord is also a good place to see updates in progress and have a deeper conversation with the devs about potential changes.
I dunno maybe for someone who plays games out of love for the setting and for the lore/roleplay/immersion there's nothing wrong with where the core PoD stands right not, but I play games for games, and as a game core PoD sorely needs more work all around.
If the mod in its current state is not enjoyable to you, then perhaps play something else for awhile. There is a great new DLC from Paradox which has a lot more resources than us for care, polish and quick production schedules. There are also hundreds of other mods you might like. Try us again when the mod and CK3 have had more time to mature. I hear there is a big update for
LotR: Realms in Exile coming out on April 3rd that sounds exciting. They have great 3D models for portraits and buildings as well as a whole new map. I also recommend
Godherja: The Dying World,
The Way of Kings CK3, and
The Bronze Age: Maryannu. None of these mods quite so pushed into the realm of reducing levies and vassalage, so have not fought so much against the AI's logic in terms of picking wars or battles. On the other hand, they all have new maps, custom portrait art, diverse faiths and even innovation changes to the GUI as well as interesting content like artifacts and societies. Really great stuff for a game only released in September.
